Online Real Estate Technology

New research out today highlights the growth in local search rates in the Asia Pacific region with Google continuing to dominate as the preferred search engine particularly in Australia with 83% share and New Zealand with 80.5% share.

This really does demonstrate that you need to get your web site up to scratch when it comes to getting a high ranking in the search results, make sure your site ranks highly for those keywords or phrases that your customers use, and if you don”t know what they are then please ask me and I’ll do a free SEO audit on your web site for you.

The study found that 38.6 billion searches were conducted in the region in September 2009, with searchers averaging nearly 88 queries per person during the month. Google Sites ranked as the top search destination in Asia Pacific, commanding more than 44 percent share of searches performed in the region.

Google Sites Captures Largest Share of Search in Asia Pacific

In September 2009, Internet users in Asia Pacific conducted 38.6 billion search queries, an increase of 33 percent from the previous year. Google Sites was the top search destination with nearly 17 billion searches performed on its sites during the month, accounting for 44.1 percent share of all searches in the region. Baidu.com Inc. followed with 8.2 billion searches (21.3 percent share), while Yahoo! Sites grabbed the #3 position with 5.3 billion searches (13.8 percent share).

Searchers in the region averaged nearly 88 searches per person during September. South Korea’s NHN Corporation, which owns search engine Naver.com, saw the most prolific search intensity among the top 10 destinations with an average of 81 searches per searcher. Searchers on Google Sites averaged 59 searches per person, while searchers on Lycos Sites averaged 51 queries.

*Excludes visitation from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs.

Local Players and Global Brands Compete for Searcher Loyalty Across Markets

An analysis of top search destinations across the 10 individual markets in the Asia-Pacific region currently reported by comScore revealed various search brand preferences across markets. Google Sites was the search market share leader in six of the markets including Australia, India, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand and Singapore. Yahoo! Sites captured the majority share of searches in Hong Kong (58.9 percent) and Taiwan (65.4 percent).

Although multinational search brands led many of the markets in the region, the popularity of local brands was evident in both China and South Korea. Baidu.com Inc. led as China’s top search destination with 63 percent share of searches performed, while NHN Corporation captured 49.3 percent of queries in Korea, leading the market as the top destination.

*Excludes visitation from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs.

The report is compiled by ComScore,a leader in measuring the digital world

During my research I’ve come across a great video that I thought I would share with you, the video was compiled by Socialnomics09, and is called Social Media Revolution: Is Social Media a Fad?

For those real estate business owners that have yet to consider social media as a business strategy then hopefully this will provide some insights into the On Line world of the future. This video details some facts and figures that are hard to ignore.

I’ve been like a voice in the wilderness promoting the value of a social media within the real estate industry in Australia so hopefully this video will add some weight to my voice.

If you do decide to adopt a social media strategy for your office, make sure you get someone who knows what they are doing, read my post on Fake Social Media Experts before you get fooled to part with your hard earned dollars by these so called experts, or better still, give me a call.

Please enjoy

Over the past few weeks I’ve spent a lot of time visiting small business offices and conducting audits on their SEO optimisation and their internet marketing efforts. The point of the exercise is seeing how vulnerable they are to competitors or where the weakness’s are in their on line strategy, and believe me, there are a lot of them.

One area that comes up more often than any other, is SEO,  or search engine optimisation, and how a business can generate a better page ranking within their local region when searching on Google, Yahoo or Bing. I’m asked this question more often than any other, and I thought I would share some interesting research and information with you on this subject.

Lets look at the US market first, and then come back to how business approach’s this in Australia, PCMS Consulting an SEO company in the US, has released a comprehensive study on the role of SEO as a marketing tool in small business.

It may come as no surpise to find that most business owners surveyed felt that an effective SEO strategy was important to their on line presence, yet could not convince the decision makers within the companies to allocate traditional marketing funds to promote their web sites with new generation SEO optimisation services.

According to the report, companies are overwhelmingly neglecting SEO optimisation and thus missing out on a considerable opportunity to boost their profits and drive traffic in today’s economic conditions.

Most searchers use keywords to conduct a search and not a brand name, therefore, even the most established companies need to optimize their websites to maintain their market position. Establishing the most searched for keywords that relate to your industry is vital to your web site performing well on the web.

Now lets look at the Australian result, in August last year, NSW based SEO company First Rate, released a report on the performance of small business web sites in the country, and the results were almost identical to the US result.

FirstRate found that, individual business web sites are failing to compete in the search engines rankings, they lacked decent natural search rankings,did not partake in paid search engine marketing for the most popular keyword search terms, and did not have good link popularity or page rank scores, as a result their web site traffic is suffering.

When you analyse the search trends or keywords relevant to your business on Google you’ll see the the popularity of each keyword.

There are lot of factors that you need to consider in optimising your web site, and these should  include link building, which is often overlooked by businesses, but is now a vital element in gaining higher search engine rankings.

High quality links need to be formed to benefit the most from linking, and just as important is the creation of  “Deep Linking”, links that point to sub pages within your web site, search engines are likely to rank these pages higher when they have high quality external links pointing to them. Creating good organic search results should be part of your strategy along with using paid SEO.

So how much of this can you control yourself? Write great content, a lot of SEO falls within writing great content and building authoritative back links to that content within your web site.

Sites that are image heavy and text light,don’t have headings and subheadings or site maps that search engines can’t crawl won’t fair well.

If you write frequent relevant content that incorporates keywords and phrases that searchers are looking for, your site will be found. This is where blogging and social media can help in the creation of good keyword rich copy and the building of back links to that content.

SEO of your web site and it’s positioning in search engine results, is vital for you to compete in business today, because more traditional forms of marketing are no longer effective in driving leads, for example, in a recent Commonwealth bank survey, they found that 75% of people did not use Yellow pages in 2008, 58% didn’t use it the year before and 80% of consumers use the Internet to research purchases.

The other consideration is that Generation X&Y do not read newspapers,don’t use Yellow pages and most of their social interactions and shopping research is done on the Internet.

There’s lot to understand about keyword rich copy, back link and reciprocal link building and web site optimisation, so if I can help demystify this for you please ask, just send me a comment on the blog or email me for information on SEO Optimisation for Small Business

One point to remember, is that 99% of your competition don’t know what their doing.

Mike Andrew owns and operates an Internet Marketing Consultancy on the Gold Coast in Queensland

It’s amazing how quickly you can get out of the discipline of writing blog posts, and having just returned from the US and not having written any articles for awhile, it’s really taken me a little time to get back in the mode again.

But here we go, I’ve written a lot about the impact social media usage is having around the world and having spent the first part of August attending the Inman technology conference in San Francisco, where social media was a dominant theme, I thought I’d take a look at what is happening in the Australian market. 

In June, over 70% of Internet users visited a social network site, that transposes into an increase of 29%. So which sites were the most popular? Facebook had the most increase out of all the sites, with Twitter benefiting from it’s mainstream popularity.

Nearly nine million Australians visited a social network in June, making it among the more popular content categories on-line. Facebook led the sector with over 6 million visitors, growing 95% from last year.

Other interesting facts are as follows: Windows Live Profile chalked up close to two million visitors, but Twitter grew the most, rising to 800,000 visitors in June — up from 13,000 in June of last year. What’s more, social networking use is quite high across the web, composing almost 90% of users that populated Australia’s top Internet properties for the month.

Social media is now an essential part of peoples’ daily on-line routine, providing a level of engagement and reach that far exceeds most other content categories, so understanding how to leverage this audience successfully is both a challenge and significant opportunity for most small business owners.

If you are still  mystified by social media, let me know and I’ll help shed some light on how you can successfully tap into this medium for your business. Another idea is to attend one of my forth coming workshops on social media.

As always, let me know if I can assist you or answer any questions you may have with regard to Internet marketing and web site SEO. 

Image via CrunchBase

With the recent addition of real estate to Google maps in Australia a lot of discussion has been generated over its value to the real estate industry.

So far, to my knowledge, of the main portals only myhome and homehound have uploaded listings to Google, although I’m sure that realestate.com.au and domain.com.au internally have been in discussions about the merits of uploading all their listings to Google.

Google will have a full time job controlling the quality of listings available, and making sure that old, outdated or sold stock is removed, just look at the issues that myhome.com.au faced when it first launched in the market with trying to maintain quality with its listings.

During a presentation to one of the major franchises on Tuesday night I was asked my opinion on this very subject and in follow up discussions with a number of people in the industry, this is it seems, more about the potential changing of the guard than anything else.

There is a feeling in the real estate community that Google may just break the monopoly of realestate.com.au.

Well, I thought I’d provide you with a link to an article that Simon Baker, ex CEO of realestate.com.au has written on his blog about this very subject, will it work for Google and what, if any impact will it have on realestate.com.au in the future.

To read the article click here

New research from the US today has revealed that Home buyers are twice as likely to use on line sources than print sources to find information about open houses they are interested in, this is according to research conducted by Harris Interactive.

The survey commissioned for Trulia.com found that 62% of US home buyers use or plan to use on line sites to find open houses, compared with 53% who use/plan to use information from real estate agents, 36% who use/plan to use neighborhood signs and less than one-third (31%), who use/plan to use print sources, including newspapers and local flyer’s. 

The study also found that though many home buyers rely upon a range of different sources to gather information about open houses, 41% say online sources are their primary resource, while 14% cite print sources.

More than 9 in 10 home buyers in the US (91%) attended or plan to attend open houses during their home-purchase process.

“The real estate section of the weekend newspaper is no longer the go-to resource for open houses,” said Sami Inkinen, co-founder and COO of Trulia. “Home buyers are increasingly going on line to not only search for the most up to date listings but also to obtain rich information about the neighborhood, schools, and local shops.”

Inkinen added that on line sites – such as Trulia – and related iPhone applications have experienced dramatic growth in recent years because they enable home buyers to search for open houses in neighborhoods that interest them, sign up for email alerts and learn more about the local areas in which they’re looking.

“We used to see home buyers walk into open houses with a newspaper in their hands,” said Aman Daro, VP of Integrated Marketing at McGuire Real Estate in San Francisco. “But now they walk in with print outs of their search on the web. What’s more, consumers are walking in very educated from their on line research – they know details about the property and the neighborhood, and are more highly engaged in the process than the casual lookers of years past.”

Here are the results of the survey as published by Harris:

On Line Vs Print

Hot on the news today is the reported closure of one of the oldest newspapers in the US, the 138 year old Tuscon Citizen. The paper will continue on as an On Line Paper in a modified format, but without news or sports coverage, it might as well be put to rest, although a move by the Santa Monica Media Corp to block the closure of the paper, after trying to negotiate to buy it, might see it survive for a few more days. This brings me to the recent moves at Fairfax in Australia, which has just recently retrenched a number of it’s on line staff, due to a merger with the print side.

Funny though, that only the digital staff were retrenched!!

It’s being promoted by Fairfax as a one stop solution for the companies clients and Fairfax is saying that all the agents out there are really in favour of it. I would suggest that they get to know the market just a little bit better, given that print is on the decline in Australia. It’s shame that this has started to happen, as Domain.com.au was starting to get it’s act together.

All they are really doing is protecting the print side of the business, and that for Domain.com.au is a very real shame.  

Maybe it’s time for the prospect of an Industry owned site to be raised again?